Reading post: December

It's the last day of December, so it's time for a reading post. I will also do an end of year recap of EVERYTHING at the beginning of January, so in a couple of days.

I started with a couple more books recommended by the New Yorker, one from my "Briefly Noted" envelopes and one from an article I recently read. 

Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans by Malcolm Gaskill (2014). I wish I could say this was interesting, but it wasn't. Something about the author's writing style was excruciatingly boring and hard to follow. Still, I kept going. It worked well as bedtime reading, putting me to sleep night after night. Finally I finished it, right before Christmas, and I was glad I'd persevered. I learned a lot about English immigration to this continent in the 1600s, and it was fun to think about what my ancestors  (who arrived in New England in 1635) were doing while such and such was going on. What a hard life and how unfortunate that they had to displace all the Indians, steal their land, and move on across America, stealing, stealing...

The other book was recommended in a recent article in the magazine ("This is Miss Lang: The brief life and forgotten legacy of a remarkable American poet" by Anthony Lane, Oct. 20, 2025). Lang sounded interesting, so I requested a book of her work from Prospector.

Poems and Plays by V. R. Lang, with a Memoir by Alison Lurie (1975). Violet Ranney "Bunny" Lang was a poet and playwright and actress and director and various other things who was born in 1924 and died very young of cancer in 1956. The memoir by Alison Lurie is the best part of the book -- Bunny sounds like a fascinatingly annoying person -- but I did like some of the poems, especially this one, which is so sweet it's almost worth memorizing:

A Lovely Song for Jackson

If I were a seaweed at the bottom of the sea,
I'd find you, you'd find me.
Fishes would see us and shake their heads
Approvingly from their submarine beds.
Crabs and sea horses would bid us glad cry,
And sea anemone smile us by.
Sea gulls alone would wing and make moan,
Wondering, wondering, where we had gone.

If I were an angel and lost in the sun,
You would be there, and you would be one.
Birds that flew high enough would find us and sing,
Gladder to find us than for anything,
And clouds would be proud of us, light everywhere
Would clothe us gold gaily, for dear and for fair.
Trees stretching skywards would see us and smile,
And all over heaven we'd laugh for a while.
Only the fishes would search and make moan,
Wondering, wondering, where we had gone. 

Isn't that nice? I don't think you often find those words written or spoken: "If I were a seaweed..." 

 

Best books of the 21st century so far

Conveniently, my book group chose a book on this list to read this month. And another book on the list was a Christmas book! And another was something I really wanted to read. So I ended up reading three more books on the list, which brought me to 60 out of 100, and that's it for me and this list. Well, maybe someday I'll read the Wolf Hall trilogy. And maybe the Roberto Bolaño books on the list when I do a Latin American literature year. And maybe a few of the others. But mostly I'm done.

Tenth of December by George Saunders (2013). A few years back I convinced my book group to read Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, which everybody basically hated. Even me, who had so very much wanted to read it. So I was nervous about this book, but it wasn't my idea, so I was off the hook. Saunders has been widely praised, and I see where the hype is coming from. But I just hated some of these stories. I think there were only one or two that I honestly liked, and they all had something icky about them. But, on the other hand, even the ickiest ("Puppy") had something to recommend it. So I don't know. I guess he's great. And I guess I don't have to read anything else by him ever again.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2020). I had wanted to read this for a while, but it was always checked out. Finally I requested it, during this last month of the year. And so appropriate -- it's a Christmas book! The best kind of Christmas book, the kind that earns its heartwarmingness. The main character, a 40-year-old coal deliverer in Ireland, rescues a young woman from the nuns, even though doing so may put his own family in jeopardy. "The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this..." It's sad, but wonderful too.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). This has been an Ishiguro year for me, because my book group read The Unconsoled and Teen B and I read Klara and the Sun for his language arts class. This one is thought by some to be his best book, but I don't know. It's the story of a friendship among doomed people, but one of the three is so nasty that perhaps I wasn't as captivated by the story as I might have been. It's science fiction, or at least "speculative," but one thing I kept thinking was that it's as though the kids are Black people born into slavery. I've also read them compared to farm animals. So if you think about the book that way, it's really sad. I'll probably be thinking about this book for a while.

 

Other reading

ESP Wars East & West: An Account of the Military Use of Psychic Espionage as Narrated by the Key Russian and American Players by Edwin C. May, Victor Rubel, Joseph W. McMoneagle, and Loyd Auerbach. In October I read an interesting book about the military use of ESP (Phenomena). While reading about that book online, I came across a very negative review by someone who said this book was better (more fair to the subject). So I thought, OK, I'll read it. But it's awful. So badly written (having four authors might be part of the problem), so boring. Almost no new interesting ESP stories, just the same ones I read in Phenomena. The one study mentioned that piqued my interest was one about whether people can sense that someone is looking at them from behind, but they didn't give any details about it. Your library probably doesn't have this (I had to get it from Prospector). Your library is smart.

 

Spent by Alison Bechdel. A few weeks ago I was reviewing what I'd read all year and realized I hadn't read any graphic novels! So I got a few from the library. I love Alison Bechdel, but I struggled with Spent a little. It's a novel, although Bechdel and her real-life wife are characters in it -- but they're a little different. For instance, they run a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, which they apparently do not do in real life, and they live down the road from a commune inhabited by aging versions of characters in Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For. The characters are so far left they are about to fall off the edge, and despite being a leftist myself, I found them annoying. But that's part of the point -- they annoy each other. At the end, the group is watching birds, and the nonbinary offspring of two of the people makes reference to "the woodcocks assigned male at birth," and I thought, "Jesus Christ!" and then I realized it was a joke, and a lot of similar comments were jokes too. The character isn't joking, but Bechdel is. Donald Trump would hate every page of this book, so I tried hard to like it a lot -- and mostly succeeded.

 

The Fire Never Goes Out: A Memoir in Pictures by Noelle Stevenson. Another graphic book, grabbed at the same time I grabbed Spent, but this was not really worth reading. Oh, I suppose a young person, late teens or 20s, might find it enlightening. The author is in her mid to late 20s, musing about her "past," which always seems so ridiculous to me. On and on about "I was broken..." "but then I realized..." And all I can think is oh come on, you're 26 or whatever, you really think you've got it all figured out? But of course you do feel like that when you're 26. Anyway, not for me, for somebody else.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson. A Christmas mystery! I found this at the GRB library, just sitting on the shelf, so of course I grabbed it. It was fun -- 24 chapters, each corresponding to the window of an advent calendar. And it was unusual because it was set in Australia, so it was really hot and sunny (of course, it was fairly warm and sunny HERE this year in late December, but we won't dwell on that). But it was also sort of boring. I never really got into it. Fortunately it was very short. And I did solve part of the mystery, which was fun -- I don't think most people would have solved it, but one of the clues fed right into my experience, so I figured it out.

 

Transitions: A Mother's Journey by Elodie Durand, translated from the French by Evan McGorray. Another graphic novel, this one about a French mother whose child transitions from female to male. It was mildly interesting, going into detail about how the mother feels, how she tries to understand but is also so angry. What was truly interesting was all the stuff included about animals (the mom is a biologist, so she knows this sort of thing). For example, all clownfish (like Nemo) are male unless the mom dies, and then within a couple of months the dad clownfish becomes female, and then one of the babies becomes the new dad, forming a sexual relationship with his old dad who is now female. Fascinating.

 

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. So I finished the year's reading with a self-help book -- appropriate for going into the new year. This was an interesting book. Instead of suggesting ways to schedule all your time, the authors focus on scheduling breaks, times to recharge so that you have plenty of energy to face your life. I wonder if the FlyLady has read this book, because Loehr and Schwartz's "rituals" reminded me of her idea of setting up "routines" to get your housework done. Both FlyLady and L&S feel that we don't have the energy to be constantly reinventing the wheel, you have to have these "routines" or "rituals" in place so that you don't have to use energy to think about what to do next. This book had a lot of good ideas which I hope I do not immediately forget, because I think I can make use of them in the new year.

 

What Comes Next?

I had thought that in 2026 I would do another themed reading year -- maybe Latin American literature, maybe German literature... Or, another idea that I'm considering is to do some historical years, read popular books from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, etc. 

But I changed my mind. Over and over, in my reading posts, I've said things like, "I'd like to read more of Author X," or "I'd like to read X book." And then I almost never go back and read those books. So in 2026 my plan is to read some of those works that I said I'd like to read. I've put together a ridiculously long list of books, and I've divided them up into categories. So in January I'm going to start with fiction by white authors, because January is a very white month, all that ice and snow. In February I'll move on to fiction by Black authors, since it's Black History Month. And so on.

I'm also planning to keep going with my "Briefly Noted" envelopes, maybe not every month, but here and there, and I'll add books from this past year's issues of the New Yorker, so the envelopes will always be full...

And I'll try to read a few more Presidential biographies. I'll definitely read one great massive biography of Eisenhower (already have it), but I might read two or three about Kennedy, so if I have to put off Johnson until 2027 that will be fine. There's no rush at this point, only 8 more dead presidents to go. Maybe more will die in the meantime.